toastal

> Phone numbers aren't required now.

Signal still requires a phone number for registration.

Why should we be trusting this centralized service? I regret getting my family onto Signal as I would love to get there somewhere where we control our data & aren’t reliant on US-based service. When you look at the EU’s Chat Control law that’s trying to be pushed, the easiest target is going to be big, centralized services in jurisdictions friendly to the EU—it’s gonna be real hard doing this with a decentralized protocol. Signal deserves just as much criticism as any other thing operating out of California.

Some of the best news I have read all week. We do not need to bend the knee to US megacorporations & proprietary code forges for open source. I hope this causes bigger discussions—especially including locking chat to platforms like Discord along the same lines.

Those are starts. There’s also plain cgit, gitweb, & Ayllu for the minimalists on Git. Sourcehut also supports Mercurial. There is also the Pijul Nest. Darcs has contemporary homes in darcs hub & Smederee. Fossil fully self-hosts itself.

It doesn’t even let you discover sources not on MS GitHub—let alone projects not using Git as a VCS? There is a ton of open source happening outside of Microsoft’s AI-filled, walled garden.

One of the other appeals of the Android ecosystem was a large selection of hardware for user-specific needs. GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixel phones which do not compare to the sorts of hardware postmarketOS or other Linux OS support.

It’s the same as unGoogling your life where you can slowly start moving off one service at a time & make sure new ones you use are open or at least otherwise ethical.

They do a good job contributing upstream to the kernel & are one of the few phones out there that still allow users to unlock the bootloader & they support headphone jacks + microSD cards.

Landing page requires JavaScript. Why.

Comments here all look fake from a ton of new accounts.

I made a partition for Nix on mine so I have all the tools I need while not relying on Jolla to package things (the installable package list is quite barren). My audio works from the speakers, but the patches to make the headphone jack (something you Fairphone users no longer know of :P) work won’t come til the next release. For banks, I just use cash or log into the website on my laptop if required—while I will refuse goods/services that require an apps to the fullest extent possible (couldn’t get around TicketMaster which was a real blood-boiler beyond just the “phone required” aspect).

This will become increasingly important as Google has boiled the frog too fast while trying to force its new store policies + banning sideloading; however, all of the pieces are now in place for them to try again in a year or 2, which history shows us they will. It’s certainly time to start toying with Linux phones if you haven’t already. This year I picked up an Xperia 10 to flash Sailfish OS on—which has rough edges (many of the hardware issues should be fixed in the next release), but Android App support bridges some of the gaps in application support.

Both XMPP (via OMEMO) & Matrix use libsignal for double-rachet encryption—so they have the same encryption properties. The biggest practical differences for the average user in my opinion is XMPP has a separate concept for DMs (not a 2-user room with encryption like Matrix), XMPP allows encryption to be both enabled then later disabled, & Matrix offers better resilience as messages & attachments get synced to all servers a room (which has a massive downside of resources, storage sizes, & moderation; if a server goes offline, you still have a history of the chat but if someone shares something explicit, such as CP, it will propagate thru the network & there is no way to delete it across nodes).

One of the better comparisons out there: https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matri...

> can run on such low resource hardware

This is what frees a barrier to decentralization & actually owning one’s data. A few of my friends are now running their own single-user or small XMPP servers since it doesn’t use much in terms of resources or storage in comparison.

> The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different doc

I believe this is what the Snikket project is trying to be. That said, XMPP servers are used for a lot more than just chat which is why most of them don’t have good defaults for merely chatting with friends since that isn’t the only or a generic enough use case (XMPP is behind Zoom, Jitsi, Fortnite, etc.).

> The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great

True. But I appreciate that there are many options & most features gracefully fallback even on TUI clients (like ‘reactions’ just being a message reply with a single emoji). If Element adds a feature (like polls), the other clients, the new feature just doesn’t show up. For a web client, the NLNet funding is really giving a boost to Movim as a reasonable alternative to Discord that is self-hostable & federated so users—taking back the meaning of “join my server” to literally mean someone’s server & without needing to create another account just to join that server.

As for the wish… this is what XMPP MUCs are—IRC with niceties like moderation, optional encryption, & file uploads. You said yourself the resources for servers is small & for your stated use case, most existing clients can handle being IRC+features while also not being centralized unlike IRC.

I tried out an alpha client once & can’t get the stupid pop-up about unverified devices to go away now. Another client didn’t have the verification flow even set up—this will end up being yet another barrier to entry for new clients. With the clients (yes, multiple) crashing often, constantly syncing for ages, & feature sets not on parity + without graceful fallbacks, I do not like the Matrix client space (nor the server space, but that is a different topic).

There has never been a better time to (re)embrace XMPP as your decentralized chat option. The clients are less buggy, handle missing features gracefully, & best part is, not being built on an eventual consistency model, you don’t have the constant syncing issue with delayed messages. If you wanted you could make an XMPP client in a day since the base spec is small/simple—& features like device verification would be seen as mandatory in the base specification.

I remember trying to get my absentee ballot information & the county I am registered in blocked requests from abroad.

Location/culture I think matter too. A lot of equatorial nations drive motorcycles & motorbikes as the default. Car drivers aren’t better drivers on the whole, but they are very aware of motorcycles at all times that I feel other places, car drivers disregard all non-car transportation—motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians.

These are things to be critical of after post-React in the explosion of complexity, but I don’t think this is FP’s fault. I did a lot of FP front-end in the actual FP languages—not languages cosplying FP with JS or TS—& these communities (Elm, PureScript, followed js_of_ocaml, Reason, & the things Haskell was trying at the time) were not jumping on these same bandwagons of complexity but hoping to wrangle in some of it, usually focused on how the view should be a declarative representation of the state while pushing side-effects to the edges. There wasn’t talks of making CSS too complex, hydration, et. al. That JS/TS crowd however…

Not a troll.

The normal, uninitiated folk don’t know any better about their choices of technology & what that means for our private data & autonomy. We have seen this song & dance of getting locked into shitty platforms like Slack, but projects are repeating history when they know better. Why not just tell folks to use Google & Apple Photos or Facebook? If you can see the advantage of your FOSS project & how it protects users, the same should apply to your own tech choices. If you want to maintain broad appeal for some reason instead of actually introducing them to other FOSS tech that would also be good for user, it might be a bit hypocritical tho understandable to have these channels open, maybe even official—but to make these the only option? Not a gateway/bridge? No mirrors? No email to send patches? Not cool.

Meanwhile, SMS 2FA is still the standard for security in Thailand :(

That brand isn’t for sale in my country

Do they come in OLED now?

> Electrolux washing machine

I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a significant discount. I cherish that machine for its dumbness.

…No such luck for TVs.

NiZ manufactures a reprogrammable 75% split keyboard in their L84 series. Granted this isn’t mechanical, but a (subjectively suprerior) electrostatic capacitive switch keyboard.

still no OLED

Shame it’s Jujutsu & not something based on actual Patch Theory (patches are commutative). I think Patch Theory is one of the ways out of merge conflict hell.

“Privacy focus” that states to “No reliance on proprietary cloud services” should not hypocritically lock their code & collaboration behind Microsoft’s GitHub.

> XMPP [… is] not it

What. XMPP is much easier to work with since both servers & clients use an order of magnitude less resources (CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth). This makes them easier to self-host & also get someone to actually launch & keep an app open if it isn’t spiking. There are handholdingest deployments like the server+client of Snikket. & if you want that web link to send someone that is skeptical of installing yet another chat application, Movim covers that angle with posts, & multi-user, multi-stream audio/voice calls (where you can use the home instance, or self-host it). But also there is clients/services for anything in between—& without a protocol that keeps as much metadata & skyrockets on costs trying to sync the entire history of every chat/attachment for all users (which inevitably leads to all that metadata synced to the mothership, Matrix.org).

Also it’s LLMs* … apostrophes don’t make words plural

Looking for a role doing front-end programming and/or dev ops

  Location: Eastern Thailand (UTC +7)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Nix, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, OCaml, PureScript, Elm (& others); general web / front-end, build scripts + pipelines / dev ops
  Résumé/CV: https://toast.al/skills/
  Logistics: US passport, native English speaker, night owl

I have done a decade & a half of front-end programming from static pages to SPAs to full web apps — mostly in functional, compile-to-Javascript languages — but would also be interested learning other UI frameworks like Qt (but probably still in functional or concatenative languages). My education was in art / design. I’ve participated in open source for ages. In recent years, I have gone deep into Nix for packaging (almost 300 commits in Nixpkgs), builds, deployments, & I would be very interested in taking this as a new arc. Open to both full-time & especially part-time opportunities.

I want any version of uBlock on the Sailfish OS browser